Áine Collins (Cork North West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Mr. Ryan and his colleagues to today’s meeting. I thank him for the annual report. I compliment him and wish him well in his new role. I also thank Mr. Ryan and his team for always being so courteous to me when I visited Enterprise Ireland. I also say well done on Enterprise Ireland’s penetration into China, Asia and the Middle East because that is where much of the new export business will come from.

My questions relate to funding. The witnesses will be pleased to hear I will not mention mentoring today. We believe that issue is finally heading towards Forfás and we hope to have results on it. We know that a lot of the jobs will come from entrepreneurship. I appreciate that Enterprise Ireland and the LEOs do provide grant aid. I accept we have the microfinance fund and all the other funds that are available. However, we still seem to have a big problem filling the gaps where Enterprise Ireland or what will be the LEOs provide funding. It is difficult to match funding or bridge funding. Has Enterprise Ireland seen any results on the banking front? The statistics still show that 96% of funding for all new businesses is coming from the banks. In order to be a truly entrepreneurial country we need many different forms of finance to penetrate and to turn all the research and innovation into a commercially viable state. I do not look for specific replies; I am just looking for the views of witnesses on the issue and what additional work we can do.

Venture capital has been a long-running issue. There is a huge gap in 1:10,000 venture capital. When we get investment in that space it usually ends up being an American or other foreign national company whose first step is to repatriate the headquarters out of Ireland to their country. We seem to be losing many potential jobs.

I examined the National Pensions Reserve Fund, NPRF, investment, which focuses on equity. It was only set up in the second quarter of last year and perhaps it is too early to see whether there is any knock-on effect from that. Is it targeting this area and what is the outlook?

I am very much aware of innovation vouchers. They have done much great work. I was in a university recently where I heard that innovation vouchers have become very bureaucratic for the amount of money involved. Is there a way of simplifying the bureaucracy in the system for both the company involved in securing a €5,000 innovation voucher and the university that is doing the work? The belief is that if the system could be streamlined then more could be done with it.